Cassette books.

Warmth Saturates `Fields'

October 19, 1995|By Sandy Bauers, Knight-Ridder/Tribune.

It had to happen. After the huge success of James Herriot, the veterinarian who wrote homespun and heartwarming tales about his practice in the Yorkshire dales of Great Britain, the literary world had to find a successor.

They came up with John McCormack, who for years worked as a veterinarian in Alabama and beyond, now heralded as an American Herriot.

In "Fields and Pastures New," which Audio Renaissance has recorded abridged (3 hours, $16.95), McCormack revists his first year as a country vet in Choctaw County, Ala.

He arrives as a young family man, virtually fresh out of veterinary school, wondering if there will be enough business for the county's first full-time vet. There is, of course, and that's not all.

McCormack wins over a comical and unforgettable assortment of characters, from Carney Sam Jenkins, the local unlicensed veterinarian who diagnoses nearly every illness as "kidneyitis," to Kent Farris, the area's biggest moonshiner.

In a series of vignettes that is both funny and--yes--every bit as heartwarming as Herriot, he recreates the scene in a sale barn, with tobacco-spitting cowboys lined up out front, his inevitable and protracted purchase of a pickup truck, and more.

Best of all, McCormack reads his book himself, giving full vent to the Tennessee accent of his birthplace, the Alabama accent of his young adulthood and the Georgia accent of his current home at the University of Georgia, where he is a professor of veterinary medicine.

He rambles along amiably, pronouncing "can't" as "cain't" and using words like "feller," "reckon" and "might could." He's known as the "vetinary" to most of his customers. The dialogue is full of those wonderful, rich and colorful Southernisms. For instance, someone who jumps into action moves "like a rabbit on springs."

On McCormack's first trip to his new house, he discovers that the paved road ends at the town limits. He stops his car and looks at what lies beyond: "Thanks to the recent rains, it was now a hopeless quagmire of red goo, punctuated by various sized holes and trenches full of yellow-tan aqueous material. I didn't know it at the time, but I was staring at a state-of-the-art, 1960s, Deep South, pre-winter secondary thoroughfare."

The whole thing is rounded out by bluesy music played at the beginning and end of each side of the cassette.